AustLit

'One of the ironies of Harry Reid’s poetry collection Leave Me Alone—in essence an order, a knee-jerk response, the default state of interacting with co-workers as they try to send you memes from The Office over the group WhatsApp—is the sense of a conversation overheard, trying to resist becoming a monologue. In this, Leave Me Alone might as well have been written by any poet trying to immortalise a specific guy, a specific summer’s day, a specific era, and the language that subsequently interferes. What is the anonymous, deifying ‘You’ of a sonnet but the precursor to an email chain’s placeholding, or the ‘you’ in Reid’s line, from the section ‘Email Signatures’: ‘I’m happy / to do it & when you / get back I have / an SOP im just dying / to show you?’' (Introduction)